Synex Server 13 R7: Smarter RAIDZ Pools and Recoverable ServerHub Modules

Synex Server 13 R7: Smarter RAIDZ Pools and Recoverable ServerHub Modules

Table of contents 

• Multi-VDEV RAIDZ Comes to Synex Installer

• ServerHub Grows Up: Recoverable Modules and Five New Additions

• synex-control Tidies Its Navigation, and the Base Gets Fresher

 

Good evening, fellow open-source enthusiasts! Synex Server, the enterprise-minded, Debian-based operating system built for people who take their storage seriously, has just rolled out its seventh revision of the Synex 13 series. Released on 7 August 2026, Synex Server 13 R7 touches three distinct corners of the distribution at once: the installer gains a genuinely useful new storage capability, ServerHub reworks how its application modules handle your data, and synex-control finally settles on one consistent way of moving around its menus. None of these are flashy headline features in the traditional sense, but together they make the day-to-day experience of running a Synex Server box noticeably calmer. Let's walk through what's changed.

 

Multi-VDEV RAIDZ Comes to Synex Installer

If you've ever set up a ZFS pool with a large disk shelf, you'll know that a single RAIDZ group isn't always the smartest way to use twelve, twenty, or thirty disks. Synex Installer, now at version 2.7.0, finally lets you split those disks across several RAIDZ groups within the same pool, rather than forcing everything into one enormous VDEV.

 

To understand why this matters, it helps to remember how ZFS pools are structured. A pool is made up of one or more VDEVs, and ZFS spreads its write workload across whichever VDEVs exist. With a single RAIDZ VDEV, every read, write, and rebuild touches the entire disk set. Carve that same set of disks into multiple smaller RAIDZ groups instead, and the pool gains genuine parallelism: operations are distributed, and if a disk fails, the rebuild (or "resilver") only has to work through the disks in that particular group rather than the whole array. The trade-off is capacity, since every additional VDEV needs its own slice of parity, so more groups mean more disks earmarked for redundancy rather than usable storage.

 

Working out which layouts are even valid for a given disk count, and what capacity each would deliver, used to be arithmetic you had to do yourself. Synex Installer now does it for you. When you pick a RAIDZ topology and more than one sensible configuration exists for your disk count, the installer presents every valid option alongside its usable capacity, so you can weigh recovery speed against storage space with the numbers already in front of you. A pool built from twenty-two disks, for instance, might be offered as a single RAIDZ2 group across all of them, or split into anywhere from two to five smaller groups, each option clearly marking how many spare disks it sets aside. There's a ceiling of six VDEVs per pool, and each RAIDZ level keeps its usual minimum disk count: three per group for RAIDZ1, four for RAIDZ2, and five for RAIDZ3. When your disk count only allows one sensible layout, the installer simply applies it without bothering you with a menu.

 

Where the maths doesn't divide evenly, leftover disks aren't wasted; they're automatically assigned as hot spares, with each menu option stating plainly how many spares it includes. Disk selection has also been made friendlier across the board: ZFS setups and the software RAID options for ext4 and XFS now accept a simple "select all" shortcut for grabbing every available disk in one go, which is a welcome time-saver on machines with dense disk shelves. The installation medium itself is sensibly excluded from that shortcut, so booting from a USB stick never risks that stick being wiped by accident.

 

All of this was put through its paces on a virtual machine loaded with twenty-two disks by the Synex Server team, covering every RAIDZ level, layouts with and without hot spares, native ZFS encryption, and boot redundancy, including deliberately booting from randomly chosen disks in the pool (spares included) and confirming that /boot replicates correctly after a kernel update. For readers who haven't yet dipped into Synex Server's storage options, it's worth remembering that the installer supports four filesystems in total: ZFS with native AES-256-GCM encryption and RAIDZ or mirrored topologies, BTRFS with LUKS2 encryption and native snapshots, and ext4 or XFS, both offering optional LUKS2-plus-LVM encryption and software RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 via mdadm. I made a test run using my limited resources on a virtual machine which was loaded with twelve disks. The first screenshot below shows how the Synex Server installer proposed to create a pool without native ZFS encryption. The next screenshot below displays the status of the pool created in the installed system:-

ServerHub Grows Up: Recoverable Modules and Five New Additions

If the installer update is a neat quality-of-life improvement, the change to ServerHub is the real substance of this release. ServerHub is Synex Server's application deployment framework, the tool you reach for when you want a working Nextcloud, monitoring stack, or identity server without wrestling with configuration files by hand. Until now, uninstalling and reinstalling a module didn't come with any solid guarantees about what happened to your data. A reinstalled module might rebuild its database from scratch, and an uninstall that claimed to preserve your data could, in practice, wipe it out the moment you reinstalled.

 

R7 rebuilds this behaviour from the ground up, applying one consistent rule to every module in the catalogue: preserving data only means anything if reinstalling actually gets that data back. Each module now checks for signs of a previous installation, whether that's a leftover configuration file, an existing database, or data sitting in a container volume, and if it finds one, it reuses that configuration, database, and user data instead of regenerating everything from zero. Uninstalling a module now clearly separates the application's code from the user's data: the code is always removed, while data, configuration, and credentials are kept unless you explicitly ask for a full wipe. Underneath, this respects how the underlying package system behaves, so a "keep my data" uninstall removes packages without purging them, and a genuine clean wipe purges everything so a later fresh install has nothing left to trip over.

 

This overhaul reached every existing module. Odoo has been bumped to version 19.0 and now keeps its master password and credentials across a reinstall. Zabbix automatically generates the en_US locale before its services start (clearing up a frontend warning that used to appear) and now preserves its configuration and database where appropriate. Nextcloud generates a random administrator password rather than a fixed default, and keeps configuration and files intact on reinstall, redeploying only the application code. GLPI has moved to version 11.0.8, leans on the PHP 8.4 stack already available in Debian 13's base repositories to simplify its dependency chain, and its uninstall routine has been fixed to allow properly clean reinstalls. The LAMP module now detects whichever PHP version is actually active instead of assuming a fixed one, and keeps databases and web content unless you ask for a full removal. FreeIPA now recognises an existing installation and starts the already-configured server rather than reinstalling the whole domain, preserving the original administrator password, and a port declaration bug (including Kerberos over UDP) has been fixed so the firewall opens the right ports automatically. Passwords generated across all of these modules are now sanitised consistently, avoiding characters that could break connection strings or configuration files.

 

Alongside the rework, ServerHub gains five brand-new modules, each built with this preservation-first approach from day one. Keycloak brings identity and access management with single sign-on, deployed in containers with a PostgreSQL backend, supporting OAuth2, OIDC, and SAML, and capable of federating users from an existing directory such as FreeIPA. Grafana adds a metrics visualisation and dashboarding platform installed from its official APT repository, connecting to sources like Prometheus, Zabbix, or your own databases. Prometheus arrives as a full monitoring stack in its own right, pairing the metrics database with node_exporter for host-level data, cAdvisor for container metrics, blackbox_exporter for endpoint probing, and Alertmanager for routing alerts, complete with ready-to-use alerting rules and a natural pairing with Grafana. Netdata offers real-time, per-second performance monitoring with anomaly detection and a zero-configuration local dashboard. Mattermost rounds things off with a self-hosted, PostgreSQL-backed team messaging and collaboration platform installed with checksum verification, giving Synex Server users a genuine alternative to proprietary chat tools. 

The ServerHub core itself has picked up some sensible housekeeping too. Selecting a module that's already installed now offers a data-preserving reinstall instead of simply refusing, which makes fixing a broken configuration far less stressful. Installation and uninstallation output now streams live in the interface rather than appearing only once a command finishes, and log directories and files are restricted to root-only access, since script output can understandably contain credentials.

 

synex-control Tidies Its Navigation, and the Base Gets Fresher

The third front in this release is synex-control, Synex Server's system administration tool, now at version 1.3.0. The tool has covered the essentials of user, network, service, and firewall management for several versions, but its navigation had grown a little inconsistent along the way: each module found its own way of handling "go back," and not every input field responded the same way to the same keys.

 

R7 fixes that by giving every key one clear, consistent job throughout the whole tool. The Escape key now steps back one level, whether you're in a menu or halfway through typing into a text field. The 0 key always returns you to the main menu regardless of how deep you've navigated, and only exits the program outright when pressed from that main menu itself. The difference is most noticeable in deeply nested screens: reaching the firewall's port configuration from the main menu crosses four levels, and previously escaping that required four separate presses of Escape. Now, a single press of 0 gets you straight back to the start, while Escape still lets you retreat one careful step at a time if that's what you actually want. Every menu now also displays a short line reminding you what Escape does, so the convention is visible rather than something you have to discover by trial and error.

 

The network module was the one part of synex-control that hadn't yet adopted the shared, filtered input handler used everywhere else, which explained both the lack of an Escape option there and the odd stray characters that could appear if you pressed a function key or an arrow key by mistake. Its seven remaining text prompts have now been brought in line with the rest of the tool. While making that change, three smaller inherited quirks were also tidied up: static IP configuration fields were displaying their labels in English even when the interface language was set to Spanish, changing the hostname didn't treat an empty entry as a cancellation, and the menu formatting for numbering, indentation, and colour didn't match the rest of the tool. Finally, the assorted exit messages shown when leaving a module for the main menu have been removed altogether, since the three different variants that used to appear were immediately wiped by the screen redraw before anyone could actually read them, and interrupting with Ctrl+C now shows the same closing message as a deliberate exit, since the end result for the user is the same either way. 

Underneath all three of these fronts, Synex Server 13 R7 also carries the full set of cumulative package updates available from the Debian Trixie repositories at build time, along with the relevant critical security patches. Notable components include the Linux kernel at version 6.12.101, systemd 257.13, OpenSSL 3.5.6, and ZFS 2.3.2, all built for the amd64 architecture.

The release is available now as a hybrid ISO image ready for both UEFI and legacy BIOS machines, and as ever, checking the published checksums before creating your installation media is a sensible habit to keep.

 

A Few Closing Thoughts

Synex Server 13 R7 isn't a release built around a single showstopping feature, and that's rather the point. Multi-VDEV RAIDZ support gives administrators managing larger disk shelves a proper say in how their pools balance capacity against recovery time, the ServerHub overhaul finally makes "preserve my data" a promise the tool actually keeps across every module, and synex-control's navigation clean-up removes a genuine source of daily friction. It's the kind of release that rewards people who actually run the software in production, rather than those just skimming a changelog, and it leaves Synex Server feeling a good deal more polished than it did a version ago.

 

Disclaimer: All product names, logos, and trademarks mentioned in this article, including Synex, ZFS, Debian, and the names of the various ServerHub modules discussed, remain the property of their respective owners and are referenced here purely for descriptive and educational purposes. The Distrowrite Project has made every reasonable effort to ensure the accuracy of the information presented, drawing solely on official sources at the time of writing, but readers should always verify critical details against the official documentation before making deployment decisions. As always, we encourage the responsible, legal, and license-compliant use of open-source software.

 

References 

• Synex Server 13 R7 announcement

• Synex Server product page

• Synex Server download (SourceForge)

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